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THROUGH GLACIER PARK

SEEING AMERICA FIRST
WITH
HOWARD EATON

BY
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY P. F. COLLIER & SON, INCORPORATED
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published May 1916

FOREWORD

There are many to whom new places are only new pictures. But, after much wandering, this thing I have learned, and I wish I had learned it sooner: that travel is a matter, not only of seeing, but of doing.

It is much more than that. It is a matter of new human contacts. It is not of places, but of people. What are regions but the setting for life? The desert, without its Arabs, is but the place that God forgot.

To travel, then, is to do, not only to see. To travel best is to be of the sportsmen of the road. To take a chance, and win; to feel the glow of muscles too long unused; to sleep on the ground at night and find it soft; to eat, not because it is time to eat, but because one's body is clamoring for food; to drink where every stream and river is pure and cold; to get close to the earth and see the stars—this is travel.

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CONTENTS

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ILLUSTRATIONS

THROUGH GLACIER PARK

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THROUGH GLACIER PARK

I
THE ADVENTURERS

This is about a three-hundred mile trip across the Rocky Mountains on horseback with Howard Eaton. It is about fishing, and cool nights around a camp-fire, and long days on the trail. It is about a party of all sorts, from everywhere, of men and women, old and young, experienced folk and novices, who had yielded to a desire to belong to the sportsmen of the road. And it is by way of being advice also. Your true convert must always preach.

If you are normal and philosophical; if you love your country; if you like bacon, or will eat it anyhow; if you are willing to learn how little you count in the eternal scheme of things; if you are prepared, for the first day or two, to be able to locate every muscle in your body and a few extra ones that seem to have crept in and are crowding, go ride in the Rocky Mountains and save your soul.

If you are of the sort that must have fresh cream in its coffee, and its steak rare, and puts its hair up in curlers at night, and likes to talk gossip in great empty places, don't go. Don't read this. Sit in a moving-picture theater and do your traveling.

But if you go—!

It will not matter that you have never ridden before. The horses are safe and quiet. The Western saddle is designed to keep a cow-puncher in his seat when his rope is around an infuriated steer. Fall off! For the first day or two, dear traveler, you will have to be extracted! After that you will learn that swing of the right leg which clears the saddle, the slicker, a camera, night-clothing, soap, towel, toothbrush, blanket, sweater, fishing-rod, fly-hook, comb, extra boots, and sunburn lotion, and enables you to alight in a vertical position and without jarring your spine up into your skull.

Now and then the United States Government does a very wicked thing. Its treatment of the Indians, for instance, and especially of the Blackfeet, in Montana. But that's another story. The point is that, to offset these lapses, there are occasional Government idealisms. Our National Parks are the expression of such an ideal.

I object to the word "park," especially in connection with the particular National Reserve in northwestern Montana known as Glacier Park. A park is a civilized spot, connected in all our minds with neat paths and clipped lawns. I am just old enough to remember when it meant "Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs also, and my childhood memories of the only park I knew are inseparably connected with a one-armed policeman with a cane and an exaggerated sense of duty.

There are no "Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs in Glacier Park, no graveled paths and clipped lawns. It is the wildest part of America. If the Government had not preserved it, it would have preserved itself. No homesteader would ever have invaded its rugged magnificence or dared its winter snows. But you and I would not have seen it.

True, so far most niggardly provision has been made. The Government offices are a two-roomed wooden cabin. The national warehouse is a barn. To keep it up, to build trails and roads, to give fire protection for its fourteen hundred square miles of great forest, with many millions of dollars worth of timber, are provided thirteen rangers! Thirteen rangers, and an annual allowance less than half of what is given to Yellowstone Park,—with this difference, too, that Yellowstone Park has had money spent on it for thirty-two years while Glacier Park is in the making! It is one of the merry little jests we put over now and then. For seventy-five miles in the north of the park there is no ranger. Government property, you see, and no protection.

But no niggardliness on the part of the Government can cloud the ideal which is the raison d'être for Glacier Park. Here is the last stand of the Rocky Mountain sheep, the Rocky Mountain goat. Here are antelope and deer, black and grizzly bears, mountain lions, trout—well, we are coming to the trout. Here are trails that follow the old game trails along the mountain-side; here are meadows of June roses, true forget-me-nots, larkspur, Indian paintbrush, fireweed,—that first plant to grow after forest fires,—a thousand sorts of flowers, growing beside snow-fields. Here are ice and blazing sun, vile roads, and trails of a beauty to make you gasp.

A congressional committee went out to Glacier Park in 1914 and three of their machines went into the ditch. They went home and voted a little money for roads after that, out of gratitude for their lives. But they will have to vote more money, much more money, for roads. A Government mountain reserve without plenty of roads is as valuable as an automobile without gasoline.

Nevertheless,—bad roads or good or none, thirteen rangers or a thousand,—seen from an automobile or from a horse, Glacier Park is a good place to visit. Howard Eaton thinks so. Last July, with all of the West to draw from, he took his first party through Glacier. This year in June, with his outfit on a pack-horse, he is going to investigate some new trails and in July he will take a party of riders over them.

Forty-two people set out with Howard Eaton last summer to ride through Glacier Park. They were of every age, weight, and temperament. About half were women. But one thing they had in common—the philosophy of true adventure.

Howard Eaton is extremely young. He was born quite a number of years ago, but what is that? He is a boy, and he takes an annual frolic. And, because it means a cracking good time, he takes people with him and puts horses under them and the fear of God in their hearts, and bacon and many other things, including beans, in their stomachs.

He has taken foreign princes and many of the great people of the earth to the tops of high mountains, and shown them grizzly bears, and their own insignificance, at one and the same time. He is a hunter, a sportsman, and a splendid gentleman. And, because equipment is always a matter of much solicitude on the part of the novice, I shall tell you what he wears when, on his big horse, he leads his long line of riders over the trails. He wears a pair of serviceable trousers, a blue shirt, and a vest! Worn by Howard Eaton, believe me, they are real clothes. He has hunted along the Rockies from Alaska to Mexico. He probably knows Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho as well as any man in the country.

When Howard Eaton first went West he located in the Bad Lands. Those were the "buffalo" days, and it was then that he began taking his friends with him on hunting trips. At first they went as his guests. Even now they are his guests in the truest sense of the word.

By their own insistence, as the parties grew larger, they determined to help defray the cost of the expeditions. Every one who knows Howard Eaton knows that his trips are not made for profit. Probably they barely pay for themselves. It is impossible to talk to him about money. Save as a medium of exchange it does not exist for him. Life for him is twenty-four hours in the open air,—half of that time in the saddle,—long vistas, the trail of game, the camp-fire at night, and a few hours of quiet sleep under the stars.

Roosevelt's ranch was near the Eaton ranch when it was in the Bad Lands. Roosevelt and Howard Eaton have taken many hunting trips together. Titled foreigners of all sorts have come over and hunted elk, deer, and other game with him. He has supplied museums, parks, and animal shows in every part of America with game. He was and is a crack shot, of course. He says he always treated the Indians with respect. "I was always a little shy when Indians were in the same country with me, and once when hunting I retired so fast that the boys said I beat my shadow six miles in fifteen minutes."

In those days the town of Sentinel Butte consisted of a canvas saloon with the sign:—

Rev. C. A. Duffy
Best Wines, Liquors, and Cigars

"I had a fine chance to steal that sign once," says Howard Eaton, "but some folks are fools, and I overlooked a bet."

The Eaton "boys"—for there are three—left Pittsburg and went West many years ago. Howard was the first. He went in 1879. In 1884 Theodore Roosevelt went out to the same country. It was in 1904 when the Eatons left the Bad Lands and went toward the Big Horn Mountain. There, at the foot of Wolf Creek and in the center of the historic battle-ground of the Arapahoes, Sioux, Crows, and Cheyennes, they established a new ranch at Wolf, Wyoming.

II
"FALL IN"

The rendezvous for the Eaton party last summer was at Glacier Park Station on the Great Northern Railway. Getting to that point, remote as it seemed, had been surprisingly easy—almost disappointingly easy. Was this, then, going to the borderland of civilization, to the last stronghold of the old West? Over the flat country, with inquiring prairie dogs sitting up to inspect us, the train of heavy Pullman diners and club car moved steadily toward the purple drop-curtain of the mountains. West, always west.

Now and then we stopped, and passengers got on. They brought with them something new, rather electric. It was enthusiasm. The rest, who had been Eastern and greatly bored, roused and looked out of the windows. For the newcomers were telling fairy tales, with wheat for gold and farmers for princes, and backing everything with figures. They think in bushels over rather a large part of America to-day.

West. Still west. An occasional cowboy silhouetted against the sky; thin range cattle; impassive Indians watching the train go by; a sawmill, and not a tree in sight over a vast horizon! Red raspberries as large as strawberries served in the diner, and trout from the mountains that seemed no nearer by mid-day than at dawn!

Then, at last, at twilight, Glacier Park Station, and Howard Eaton on the platform, and old Chief Three Bears, of the Blackfeet, wonderfully dressed and preserved at ninety-three.

It was rather a picturesque party. Those who had gone up from the Eaton ranch in Wyoming—a trifle of seven hundred miles—wore their riding-clothes to save luggage. Khaki was the rule, the women mostly in breeches and long coats, with high-laced shoes reaching to the knee and soft felt hats, the men in riding-clothes, with sombreros and brilliant bandannas knotted about their throats. One or two had rather overdone the part and were the objects of good-natured chaffing later on by the guides and cowboys.

"Hi!" cried an urchin as we walked about the streets of Billings, Montana, to stretch train-tired muscles. "Here's the 101 Ranch!"

Not very long before I had been to the front in Belgium and in France. I confess that no excursion to the trenches gave me a greater thrill than the one that accompanied that start the next morning from the Glacier Park Hotel to cross the Continental Divide. For we were going to cross the Rockies. Our route was three hundred miles long. It was over six passes, and if you believe, as I did, that a pass is a valley between two mountains, I am here to set you right.

A pass is a bloodcurdling spot up which one's horse climbs like a goat and down the other side of which it slides as you lead it, trampling ever and anon on a tender part of your foot. A pass is the highest place between two peaks. A pass is not an opening, but a barrier which you climb with chills and descend with prayer. A pass is a thing which you try to forget at the time and which you boast about when you get back home. For I have made it clear, I think, that a horseback trip through Glacier Park, across the Rockies, and down the Pacific Slope, is a sporting proposition. It is safe enough. Howard Eaton has never had an accident. But there are times—

Once, having left the party to make a side trip, my precious buckskin horse—called "Gold Dollar"—was "packed" over. Now, Gold Dollar was a real horse with a beard. He was not a handsome horse. Even when I was on him, no one would have turned to admire. But he was a strong horse, and on a trail up a switchback—do you know what a switchback is?—well, a mountain switchback bears about as much relation to the home-grown amusement-park variety as a stepmother to the real thing—on a switchback he was well-behaved. He hugged the inside of the trail, and never tried to reach over the edge, with a half-mile drop below, to crop grass. He was not reckless. He was a safe and sane horse. He never cared for me, but that is beside the question.

So, having temporarily left Gold Dollar, I had to get back to him. I had to go fifty miles to do it, and I was provided with a horse by the man who holds the horse concession in the park. A horse? A death-trap, a walking calamity, a menace. If the companies who carry my life insurance had seen me on that horse, they would have gone pale. He was a white horse, and he was a pack-horse. Now, the way of a pack-horse is on the edge of the grave. Because of his pack he walks always at the outer side of the trail. If his pack should happen to hit the rocky wall, many unpleasant things would follow, including buzzards. So this beast, this creature, this steed of death, walked on the edge of the precipice. He counted that moment lost that saw not two feet dangling blithely over the verge. Now and then the verge crumbled. We dislodged large stones that fell for a mile or two, with a sickening thud. Once we crossed a snow-field which was tilted. He kept one foot on the trail and gave the other three a chance to take a slide. There was a man riding behind me. When it was all over, he shook my hand.

Off, then, to cross the Rocky Mountains—forty-two of us, and two wagons which had started early to go by road to the first camp: cowboys in chaps and jingling spurs; timorous women, who eyed rather askance the blue and purple mountains back of the hotel; automobile tourists, partly curious and partly envious; the inevitable photographer, for whom we lined up in a semi-circle, each one trying to look as if starting off on such a trip was one of the easiest things we did; and over all the bright sun, a breeze from the mountains, and a sense of such exhilaration as only altitude and the West can bring.

Then a signal to fall in. For a mile or two we went two abreast, past a village of Indian tepees, past meadows scarlet with the Indian paintbrush, past—with condescension—automobile busses loaded with tourists who craned and watched. Then to the left, and off the road. The cowboys and guides were watching us. As we strung out along the trail, they rode back and forward, inspecting saddles, examining stirrups, seeing that all were comfortable and safe. For even that first day we were to cross Mount Henry, and there must be no danger of saddle slipping.

Quite without warning we plunged into a rocky defile, with a small river falling in cascades. The shadow of the mountain enveloped us. The horses forded the stream and moved sedately on.

Did you ever ford a mountain stream on horseback? Do it. Ride out of the hot sun into a brawling valley. Watch your horse as he feels his way across, the stream eddying about his legs. Give him his head and let him drink lightly, skimming the very surface of the water with his delicate nostrils. Lean down and fill your own cup. How cold it is, and how clear! Uncontaminated it flows down from the snow-covered mountains overhead. It is living.

III
THE SPORTING CHANCE

The trail began to rise to the tree-covered "bench." It twisted as it rose. Those above called cheerfully to those below. We had settled to the sedate walk of our horses, the pace which was to take us over our long itinerary. Hardly ever was it possible, during the days that followed, to go faster than a walk. The narrow, twisting trails forbade it. Now and then a few adventurous spirits, sighting a meadow, would hold back until the others had got well ahead, and then push their horses to the easy Western lope. But such joyous occasions were rare.

Up and up. The trail was safe, the grade easy. At the edge of the bench we turned and looked back. The great hotel lay below in the sunlight. Leading to it were the gleaming rails of the Great Northern Railway. We turned our horses and went on toward the snow-covered peaks ahead.

The horses moved quietly, one behind the other. As the trail rose there were occasional stops to rest them. Women who had hardly dared to look out of a third-story window found themselves on a bit of rocky shelf, with the tops of the tallest trees far below. The earth, as we had known it, was falling back. And, high overhead, Howard Eaton, at the head of the procession, was sitting on his big horse silhouetted against the sky.

The first day was to be an easy one—twelve miles and camp. "Twelve miles!" said the experienced riders. "Hardly a Sunday morning canter!" But a mountain mile is a real mile. Possibly they measure from peak to peak. I do not know. I do know that we were almost six hours making that twelve miles and that for four of it we led our horses down a mountain-side over a vacillating path of shale. Knees, that up to that point had been fairly serviceable, took to chattering. Riding-boots ceased to be a matter of pride and emerged skinned and broken. The horses slid and stumbled. And luncheon receded.

Down and down! Great granite cliffs of red and blue and yellow across the valley—and no luncheon! Striped squirrels hiding in the shale—and no luncheon! A great glow of moving blood through long-stagnant vessels, deep breaths of clear mountain air, a camera dropped on the trail, a stone in a horse's foot—and no luncheon!

Two o'clock, and we were down. The nervous woman who had never been on a horse before was cinching her own saddle and looking back and up. The saddle tightened, she sat down and emptied her riding-boots of a few pieces of rock. Her silk stockings were in tatters.

"I feel as though my knees will never meet again," she said reflectively. "But I'm so swollen with pride and joy that I could shriek."

That's what it is, partly. A sense of achievement; of conquering the unconquerable; of pitting human wits against giants and winning—a sporting chance. You may climb peaks in a railroad coach and see things as wonderful. But you are doing this thing yourself. Every mile is an achievement. And, after all, it is miraculously easy. The trails are good. The horses are steady and sure-footed. It is a triumph of endurance rather than of courage.

If you have got this far, you are one of us, and you will go on. For the lure of the high places is in your blood. The call of the mountains is a real call. The veneer, after all, is so thin. Throw off the impedimenta of civilization, the telephones, the silly conventions, the lies that pass for truth. Go out to the West. Ride slowly, not to startle the wild things. Throw out your chest and breathe; look across green valleys to wild peaks where mountain sheep stand impassive on the edge of space. Let the summer rains fall on your upturned face and wash away the memory of all that is false and petty and cruel. Then the mountains will get you. You will go back. The call is a real call.

Above the timber-line we rode along bare granite slopes. Erosion had been busy here. The mighty winds that sweep the crests of the Rockies had bared the mountains' breasts. Beside the trails high cairns of stones were piled, so that during the winter snow the rangers might find their way about. Remember, this is northwestern Montana; the Canadian border is only a few miles away, and over these peaks sweeps the full force of the great blizzards of the Northwest.

The rangers keep going all winter. There is much to be done. In the summer it is forest fires and outlaws. In the winter there are no forest fires, but there are poachers after mountain sheep and goats, opium smugglers, bad men from over the Canadian border. Now and then a ranger freezes to death. All summer these intrepid men on their sturdy horses go about armed with revolvers. But in the fall—snow begins early in September, sometimes even in August—they take to snowshoes. With a carbine strung to his shoulders, matches in a waterproof case, snowshoes and a package of food in his pocket, the Glacier Park ranger covers unnumbered miles, patrolling the wildest and most storm-ridden country in America. He travels alone. The imprint of a strange snowshoe on the trail rouses his suspicion. Single-handed he follows the marks in the snow. A blizzard comes. He makes a wikiup of branches, lights a small fire, and plays solitaire until the weather clears. The prey he is stalking cannot advance either. Then one day the snow ceases; the sun comes out. Over the frozen crust his snowshoes slide down great slopes with express speed. Generally he takes his man in. Sometimes the outlaw gets the drop on the ranger first and gets away.

During the winter of 1913 one of these rangers was frozen to death. He was caught in a blizzard, and he knew what was coming. When at last he sat down beside the trail to wait for death he placed his snowshoes points upward in the snow beside him. He sat there, and the snow came down and covered him. They found him the next day by the points of his snowshoes.

The snow melts in the summer on the meadows and in the groves. But the peaks are still covered, and here and there the trail leads through a snow-field. The horses venture out on it gingerly. The hot sun that blisters the face seems to make no impression on these glacier-like patches, snow on top and ice beneath. Flowers grow at their very borders. Striped squirrels and whistling marmots, much like Eastern woodchucks, run about, quite fearless, or sit up and watch the passing of the line of horses and riders, so close that they can almost be touched.

Great spaces; cool, shadowy depths in which lie blue lakes; mountain-sides threaded with white, where, from some hidden lake or glacier far above, the overflow falls a thousand feet or more, and over all the great silence of the Rockies! Nerves that have been tightened for years slowly relax. There is not much talking. The horses move along slowly. The sun beats down. Some one, shading his eyes with his hand, proclaims a mountain sheep or goat on a crag overhead. The word passes back along the line. Also a thrill. Then some wretched electrical engineer or college youth or skeptical lawyer produces a pair of field-glasses and announces it to be a patch of snow.

Here and there we saw "tourist goats," rocks so shaped and situated as to defy the strongest glass. The guides pointed them out and listened with silent enjoyment to the resulting acclamation. After that discovery, we adopted a safe rule: nothing was a goat that did not move. Long hours we spent while our horses wandered on with loose reins, our heads lifted to that line, just above the timber, which is Goatland. And the cry "A goat!" and the glasses, and skepticism—often undeserved.

The first night out of doors I did not sleep. I had not counted on the frosty nights, and I was cold. The next day I secured from a more provident member of the party woolen pajamas. Clad in those, and covered with all the extra portions of my wardrobe, I was more comfortable. But it takes woolen clothing and bed socks to keep out the chill of those mountain nights.

One rises early with Howard Eaton's party. No matter how late the story-tellers have held the crowd the night before around the camp-fire, somewhere about five o'clock, Howard—he is either Howard or Uncle Howard to everybody—comes calling among the silent tepees.

"Time to get up!" he calls. "Five o'clock and a fine morning. Up with you!"

And everybody gets up. There are basins about. Each one clutches his cake of soap and his towel, and fills his basin from whatever lake or stream is at hand. There is plenty of water in Glacier Park, and the camps are generally beside a lake. The water is cold. It ought to be, being glacier water, cold and blue. The air is none too warm. A few brave spirits seek isolation and a plunge bath. The majority are cowards.

Now and then a luxurious soul worried the cook for hot water. They tell of a fastidious lady who carried a small tin pail of water to the cook tent and addressed the cook nervously as he beat the morning flapjacks with a savage hand.

"Do you think," she inquired nervously, "if—if I put this water on your stove, it will heat?"

He turned and eyed her.

"You see it's like this, lady," he said. "My father was a poor man and couldn't give me no education. Damned if I know. What do you think?"

Before one is fairly dressed, with extra garments thrust into the canvas war-sack or duffle-bag which is each person's allowance for luggage, the tents are being taken down and folded. The cook comes to the end of the big tent.

"Come and get it!" he yells through hollowed hands.

"Come and get it!" is repeated down the line of tepees. That is the food call of an Eaton camp. Believe me, it has the butler's "Dinner is served, madame," beaten forty ways for Sunday. There is no second call. You go or you don't go. The long tables under the open end of the cook tent are laden with bacon, ham, fried eggs, flapjacks, round tins of butter, enameled cups of hot coffee, condensed milk, sometimes fried fish. For the cook can catch trout where the most elaborately outfitted Eastern angler fails.

The horses come in with a thudding of hoofs and are rounded up by the men into the rope corral. Watched by night herders, they have been grazing quietly all night in mountain valleys. There is not much grass for them. By the end of the three hundred-mile trip they are a little thin, although in good condition. It is the hope of the Superintendent of the Park and of others interested that the Government will soon realize the necessity for planting some of the fertile valleys and meadows with grass. There are certain grasses that will naturalize themselves there—for instance, clover, blue-joint, and timothy. Beyond the first planting they would need nothing further. And, since much of the beauty of this park will always be inaccessible by motor, it can never be properly opened up until horses can get sufficient grazing.

Sometimes, at night, our horses ranged far for food,—eight miles,—even more. Again and again I have watched my own horse nosing carefully along a green bank and finding nothing at all, not a blade of grass it could eat.

With the second day came a new sense of physical well-being, and this in spite of a sunburn that had swollen my face like a toothache. Already telephones and invitations to dinner and tailor's fittings and face powder belonged to the forgotten past. I carried over my saddle and placed it beside my horse, and a kindly and patronizing member of Howard Eaton's staff put it on and cinched it for me. I never learned how to put the thing on, but I did learn, after a day or two, to take it off, as well as the bridle and the red hackamore, and then to stand clear while my buckskin pony lay down and rolled in the grass to ease his weary back. All the horses rolled, stiff-legged. If the saddle did not come off in time, they rolled anyhow, much to the detriment of cameras, field-glasses, and various impedimenta strapped thereon.